By , Chalkbeat, and , ProPublica

The need to close underenrolled schools has become an important storyline this year, but few areas are dealing with as many nearly-empty buildings as Chicago Public Schools. ProPublica鈥檚 Jennifer Smith Richards and Chalkbeat鈥檚 Mila Koumpilova completed an in-depth analysis of underutilized schools in the country鈥檚 fourth-largest district and found that three in 10 buildings sit half-empty. And many come with a steep per-student price tag 鈥� the highest being $93,000. Richards and Koumpilova carefully explained Chicago鈥檚 history of school closures and the tense fight between district officials, families and the teachers union about next steps. They tune into what matters most: How tiny schools 鈥� some with enrollments in the double digits 鈥� impact student opportunities and educational experience. Some students seem to thrive in a tight-knit community, but the overarching lack of resources causes challenges for everyone. 鈥淵ou try to have a homecoming, but there鈥檚 no football team,鈥� said a former principal of Hirsch High School, which has 100 students in a building that can fit 1,000. 鈥淭here鈥檚 nothing to come home to.鈥�

By The 19th 

As immigration enforcement activities have escalated over the past year, the early care and education workforce has been on edge. Immigrants represent more than 20% of the child care workforce nationwide. Chabeli Carrazana’s story for The 19th about Nicolle Orozco Forero 鈥� an immigrant child care provider who takes care of children with disabilities and was taken into ICE custody with her family 鈥� sheds light on the immense impact her detention and eventual deportation had on her community. Carrazana traces Orozco Forero鈥檚 journey: from fleeing Colombia two years earlier with her husband and sons, to searching for answers to her son鈥檚 unexplained illness to working toward her dream of opening her own child care program. Carrazana also illustrates how Orozco Forero鈥檚 rare expertise in supporting children with disabilities filled a critical gap in a field already strained by staffing shortages and limited specialized care. This story stays with you, especially the deep ripple effect of Orozco Forero鈥檚 deportation on the families and community she served.

Visuals by Eli Durst; Text by Dina Gachman, The New York Times

In Austin, tweens are attending 鈥渃otillion鈥� classes where they learn how to fold a napkin, hold utensils and dance. These aren鈥檛 essential life skills but surreptitiously the founders of the Southwest Austin Cotillion hope to teach the kids social skills and build their confidence. The strict no-electronics policy ensures the kids embrace the awkwardness of it all. It鈥檚 inspiring to see these kids put on a brave face and give way to the odd social mores 鈥� at least for a few hours. The fly on the wall black-and-white photography and spare text of this article did an excellent job illustrating the story. Kudos to producers Jolie Ruben and Josephine Sedgwick for creating an interactive experience that feels like an old Life magazine article reinvented for the web. Here, the future of storytelling borrows from the past and utilizes the latest technology where it works.

By Iowa Public Radio

Following the pandemic, school districts ramped up the use of the four-day school week to address a teacher absenteeism crisis and recruit staff at a time of severe shortages. Nicole Grundmeier with Iowa Public Radio鈥檚 Midwest Newsroom took a deep look at the trend with her August feature on how the policies have affected students. With data, research and personal stories, she captured the tough choices districts face as they weigh the benefits and drawbacks of giving staff and kids a longer weekend. Jayce Moody, who used to wander out of class and throw things in frustration, could better manage his behavior with a shorter school week. 鈥淗e no longer has to miss school for therapy and other appointments,鈥� she wrote. 鈥淛ayce jumped several levels in reading.鈥� But other families, she wrote, depend on schools for child care or food pantries to stretch meals until Monday. Grundmeier鈥檚 reporting offered a thoughtful examination of what happens before and after school boards vote on such a pivotal change to the schedule and how opting in favor of a reduced school week might not accomplish what they鈥檇 hoped it would. 

By and , The Baltimore Banner

Every day, hundreds of Baltimore middle and high schoolers are missing when the first-period bell rings 鈥� the result of a public transit system that makes it virtually impossible for as many as 25,000 students to get to class on time. Without a yellow bus system beyond elementary school, an investigation by The Baltimore Banner found, children as young as 11 crisscross the city on long, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous journeys that frequently get them to class late, or not at all. They stand in drenching rain, endure sexual harassment from strangers and witness violent fights on buses on commutes that can take 40 minutes each way on a good day 鈥� and often last twice as long. As the district doesn鈥檛 collect data on how students get to school, The Banner modeled their trips based on where they live and the school they attend. It then tracked the location of every Maryland Transit Administration bus every five seconds, 20 hours a day, and mapped those commutes using innovative, interactive graphics. The result: a poignant portrait of young people whose futures are being put at risk by the simple lack of a safe, dependable ride to school.

By , The Associated Press

Housing insecurity can be incredibly disruptive to a family鈥檚 life, especially when it comes to children鈥檚 education. To highlight this challenge, Associated Press reporter Bianca V谩zquez Toness followed an Atlanta mother as she navigated the process of finding an apartment in the right school district, keeping her son on track academically and making enough money to keep the family afloat. There’s something about how Toness opened this story that felt brilliantly relatable and illustrated how issues, like housing insecurity, can happen to anyone. Toness does a good job humanizing these vulnerable circumstances and giving a glimpse into how hard parents work and fight to make sure their children are set up for success. You can tell Toness not only earned the trust of the family she highlighted, and told their story with the utmost amount of dignity, but she also was incredibly well-informed and resourced on how complex eviction is and can be. 

By, The New York Times Magazine

Florida attorney and mother of three, Megan Garcia, has become perhaps the best-known face in the fast-emerging legal and regulatory battle over AI chatbots. After her 14-year-old son died by suicide after forming an intensely romantic and sexually explicit relationship with a Character.AI bot, Garcia sued the tech creators for wrongful death, participated in multiple interviews and testified before the U.S. Senate about the need for stronger guardrails. By giving writer Jesse Baron access to her son鈥檚 conversations with the bot that personified Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, Garcia enabled a masterful Baron to produce a gripping and illuminating account of how a lonely and often-despairing young teen can fall in love with a robot, losing the line between reality and fantasy and slipping further away from the physical world and its human relationships. It鈥檚 a harrowing descent. The Garcia case will likely be among the first to establish legal precedent around the juggernaut that is AI. Days after Barron鈥檚 story ran, Character.AI announced that it was banning those under 18 from using its chatbots. All of that comes too late for Sewell Setzer III, who truly believed that by dying he would be going home to Westeros and his one true love.

By Alvin Chang, The Pudding 

How much do children鈥檚 environment and experiences influence the rest of their life? Alvin Chang鈥檚 interactive 鈥淭his Is a Teenager鈥� tackles that question with ease 鈥� turning National Longitudinal Surveys data into conversational, visual storytelling. The project follows hundreds of teens into their late 30s, allowing viewers to dive into 24 years of circumstances and consequences. As the interactive timeline moves through the years, you can see who went to college, who stayed financially stable, who was the victim of violence, who considers themselves happy. I was absorbed for hours. The project revisits one teen in particular, called Alex, who grew up in a high-risk environment. He had a difficult home life, was bullied and held back in school. By 2021, he reported feeling depressed 鈥渕ost of the time.鈥� Yet, as Chang writes, 鈥渨e are blamed for not going to college, for being unhealthy, for being poor, for not being able to afford healthcare and food and housing.鈥� That line hit hard, especially after watching Alex鈥檚 life unfold. The equally engaging complements the piece, making decades-long data feel digestible.

By  The Hechinger Report

A report on Trump administration college admissions proposals, published earlier this month by The Hechinger Report鈥檚 Jon Marcus, may turn out to be one of the most consequential pieces of journalism of the year. 

Marcus looked at admissions data and found that while President Trump鈥檚 scrutiny largely zeroes in on race, his ban on DEI policies could harm men, notably white men, his most loyal demographic.

That鈥檚 because universities for decades have been quietly offering men, who tend to leave high school with fewer skills and lower GPAs, an advantage. While they鈥檝e historically enrolled more women than men, federal data show, they鈥檝e also admitted higher percentages of male applicants. At Baylor University, for instance, 56.8% of males who applied got in, versus. just 47.9% of females.

So while colleges may soon follow U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon鈥檚 exhortation to judge aspiring students 鈥渟olely on their merits, not their race or sex,鈥� the end result could be thousands of young men who don鈥檛 have a place in future freshman classes 鈥� a development that 鈥渄rips with irony,鈥� says one top policy wonk.

By , The Philadelphia Inquirer

Anyone who’s spent much time reading about schools will remember New York City’s “rubber room” 鈥� an archipelago of reassignment centers for hundreds of school employees awaiting arbitration for alleged professional offenses. In January, more than 15 years after journalist Steven Brill first popularized the term, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Kristen Graham gave us an account of Philadelphia’s own rubber room, a way station where some teachers and administrators spend years gathering paychecks and dust. The dispatch offers excellent texture about wasted days in what is effectively a professional prison 鈥� the long-timers graduate into the best seats, while access to extension cords is carefully negotiated 鈥� but many of the details are dispiritingly familiar: Complaints from former rubber room occupants first bubbled into a citywide scandal back in 2011. It increasingly feels like the broader subject of teacher job protections and complaint adjudication is itself akin to the rubber room, a windowless abyss to which all education journalists must eternally return.   

By , NBCU Academy

Alvin Irby, a former first grade teacher, saw an opportunity to improve literacy among Black boys while watching one of his students get a haircut. In 2013, he founded Barbershop Books, providing books for children to read while sitting in the barber鈥檚 chair and training barbers to become mentors to their young clients. Reporter Maya Brown, who was then with NBCU Academy Multimedia, provides a beautiful masterclass in visual storytelling that shows how familiar cultural settings can be used to boost literacy and reading comprehension. In Brown鈥檚 video and text package, we see students getting haircuts and walking away with a stronger motivation to read and barbers who are passionate and committed reading coaches. What excited me most about this story was knowing that Black boys across the country are being seen and supported through Barbershop Books, which is now in 60 cities across the U.S. Brown brilliantly captures how these encounters not only shape the students鈥� hairline but their education journey, too. 

By and , ProPublica 

What if the leaders put in charge of the nation鈥檚 public schools are actually rooting against them? ProPublica analyzed dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events 鈥� as well as writings 鈥� for Education Secretary Linda McMahon鈥檚 appointees finding 鈥渁 recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools.鈥� and 鈥檚 story dug deep into these records to paint a vivid picture of the powerful forces that both govern and seek to dismantle public education. Every sentence was impactful and the graphics, while cartoonish and playful, powerfully illustrate each point. The voices that fill the piece were well chosen, each offering an insightful view, to a movement that started well before the current administration. For instance, Maurice T. Cunningham, a retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts provided helpful context, saying parents鈥� rights groups have long aimed 鈥渢o undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization.鈥� 

By , The Hechinger Report

In 2006, Minnesota passed a law requiring all eighth graders to take Algebra I, a move designed to boost the number of students taking calculus and eventually going into math and science careers. But an investigation by The Hechinger Report suggests it hasn鈥檛 worked as planned. Reporter Steven Yoder analyzed federal data from 2009 to 2017 and found the share of the state鈥檚 students taking calculus rose modestly, from 1.25% to 1.76%. But other states saw far larger gains, and Minnesota dropped from sixth to 10th place among states for calculus enrollment as a share of total enrollment. The state鈥檚 ranking for eighth grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress also fell. Yoder鈥檚 research, including visits to classrooms in one Minnesota school district, demonstrates the need for more nuance in determining who should take algebra and when.  

By , The Washington Post

You would know this compulsively readable feature was written by The Washington Post’s Casey Parks even without the byline. Parks is a master at coming to inhabit a small community, chameleon-like, and finding its social glue. In this case, it鈥檚 the lone bookstore in Vermillion, South Dakota, threatened with closure when the state legislature voted to force the 10-year-old daughter of its owners to use the boys’ bathroom at school. Five and a half years ago, Mike and Jen Phelan opened the store on Vermillion鈥檚 Main Street where, red state reputation notwithstanding, most of the brick storefronts sported Pride flags. The locals embraced the couple鈥檚 transgender daughter, with the Vermillion School Board voting in 2021 to allow her to use the girls鈥� bathroom. Which she did without incident until South Dakota鈥檚 GOP statehouse majority passed a bathroom ban this year. As the Phelans packed to move to a New England community where the girl would be affirmed, they prepared to sell the business to Nova and Elias Donstad, a trans couple. 鈥淭hey fell in love reading next to each other most evenings, and they fell for South Dakota the way many transplants did 鈥� accidentally,鈥� writes Parks. The bookworms were desperate to rescue the store, but couldn鈥檛 afford to buy it. As it happens, their neighbors couldn鈥檛 imagine Vermillion without the shop, and raised $22,000 for the couple鈥檚 down payment. 

By , CalMatters

Since The Boston Globe鈥檚 early 2000s reporting exposed widespread childhood sexual abuse in the Catholic church, similar school-based stories have proliferated. This has been made possible as states open 鈥渓ook-back鈥� windows, temporarily lifting the statute of limitations on civil abuse cases. Survivors of childhood sexual abuse I鈥檝e spoken with for my own reporting have shared the power of these windows: they provide an opportunity 鈥� albeit delayed 鈥� for justice. CalMatters Carolyn Jones鈥� reporting on California鈥檚 2020 law 鈥� which provided a three-year window for victims to file claims and made it easier to sue school districts and counties 鈥� stands out because of her ability to skillfully and thoughtfully walk a tough line: emphasizing the very real presence of sexual abuse in schools and the need to hold complicit institutions accountable, while also exposing the unintended financial consequences that can result from these windows. The story raises complex and thorny questions: Who should be held accountable for years-old sexual abuse, especially in cases where the perpetrator is dead and school district personnel have since turned over? And how can we hold the systems that failed these victims responsible, without pulling funding from current students? 

By , NPR

NPR鈥檚 November interview with photographer Melissa Ann Pinney included a trove of incredible pictures that practically jump off the page, err screen. After being granted access to two Chicago schools starting seven years ago, Pinney began taking photos in her 鈥淏ecoming Themselves鈥� series. Pinney captures incredible facial expressions and body language of what she called 鈥渙ften overlooked communities of children and teens in Chicago.鈥� Her ability to play with light and shadows adds a dimension of moodiness that feels right when teens are the subject. Each picture tells its own story with a range of emotions and experiences, including hope, fear, friendship, and love. My favorites include Lizzie Williams in her My Little Pony leggings;  Kho鈥檝ya Greenwood and her brother Coby at a prom celebration; and Jo Gonda and Andrew McDermott at the prom. Each photo is truly a gem 鈥� and Pinney鈥檚 interview adds to the experience.  

By Photographs by , The New York Times 

This year鈥檚 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act offers a stark reminder that we鈥檙e not that far removed from the days when people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were sent away to special public institutions. One of those, the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts 鈥� 鈥渢he Fernald,鈥� as locals call it 鈥� housed John Scott, who had spina bifida and spent most of his 17 years there before his death and burial in an unmarked grave in 1973. In this heartbreaking and masterfully told story, New York Times reporter Sonia Rao describes the journey of Scott鈥檚 brother David, who was just 7 when John died, as he seeks to learn more about his brother and what happened to him. A direct appeal to the governor eventually led him to a rust-colored accordion folder filled with 70 documents about his brother鈥檚 short life. In interviews, a teacher described John as one of her brightest students and 鈥渁 little ray of sunshine.鈥� But she also spoke of what David called 鈥渁trocities鈥� at the school. 鈥淓ighty percent of the stuff I saw there, I wish I could erase from my mind,鈥� she said. That reality is especially poignant given that there were at least 10,000 unmarked graves for people like John in Massachusetts alone 鈥� and the Fernald is one of hundreds of similar institutions for people with disabilities that once dotted the national landscape.

By , Voice of San Diego

Just when you thought you鈥檇 seen every kind of shady behavior around AI and digital learning, along comes Voice of San Diego鈥檚 Jakob McWhinney with an: Would you believe that fraudsters are stealing community college students鈥� identities and enrolling in remote classes to cash in on their financial aid? McWhinney finds that thieves create 鈥渂ot students鈥� that enroll in large online classes and remain just long enough to cash in on state and federal aid. They often turn to generative AI to fake the first few assignments. McWhinney finds that one in four California community college applicants last year was a suspected bot. He offers an to help readers understand exactly how it all works. If the aid theft isn鈥檛 bad enough, he finds that the bots also bump real students from classes 鈥� and wreak havoc around enrollment. He talks to a Southwestern College professor who realizes that, two weeks into last spring鈥檚 semester, just 15 of the 104 students enrolled in her classes and a wait-list, were real. As a result, Southwestern now requires all remote students to show up face-to-face at enrollment time just to prove they鈥檙e real. 

By , NBC News

In a year that will be remembered for intensifying political extremism on the internet and a sharp increase in political violence in the physical world, investigative reporter Tyler Kingkade of NBC News surfaces a compelling tale of what happens when everyday people find themselves in the crosshairs of the culture wars. After Charlie Kirk鈥檚 murder led to government-endorsed revenge against the far-right pundit鈥檚 critics, Kingkade highlighted how a small school district in Arizona was thrust into a campus safety crisis after an online disinformation campaign falsely accused teachers of celebrating his death. The lie, which centered on a costume worn by math teachers, was perpetuated by conservative influencers and Republican lawmakers. The resulting firestorm offers clear evidence that online vitriol can destabilize public safety 鈥� including in schools.